Tracking police force
Our view: Police departments must cooperate with FBI efforts to improve data on incidents of excessive use of force
When Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., last year, the killing of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer sparked weeks of protests and civil unrest in the majority-black city. Demonstrators charged the shooting was part of a pattern of excessive use of force by police, a message that was repeated elsewhere across the country over the following months in response to other incidents. Since then the FBI has launched investigations of police misconduct in a number of cities, including Baltimore. But the agency still doesn’t have the kind of detailed data that would allow it to determine whether such killings, however unfortunate, are largely isolated events or part of a broader national trend.
That’s why it’s welcome news that the FBI plans to sharply expand efforts to collect data on excessive use of force by police. “We are responding to a real human outcry,” Stephen L. Morris, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, told The Washington Post Tuesday. “People want to know what police are doing, and they want to know why they are using force. It always fell to the bottom before. It is now the highest priority.”
The initiative, expected to be in place by 2017, will go beyond tracking fatal police shootings to include any incident in which an officer causes serious injury or death to people they detain or arrest. The program will seek to collect much more detail about how often and under what circumstance police use deadly force, including the gender and race of the officers and suspects, whether the suspects were unarmed or armed and what type of weapon was involved.
The agency has long collected information on police use of force, but the data is spotty because reporting by police departments is voluntary and only 3 percent of the nation’s 18,000 police departments participate. That’s far too few to make the data useful nationally, and as a result the agency’s records are less complete than those of some publicly searchable databases compiled by the news media — including The Post — and other organizations. Authorities can more easily obtain data on weekly movie attendance or the number of people who have had flu shots than information about how many police-involved shootings occur across the country. The FBI needs more consistent data on such incidents both to improve transparency and to identify patterns of police misconduct that make the excessive use of force more likely.
Some states already have toughened the reporting requirements for such incidents. New York, for example, now requires that a special prosecutor investigate all police-involved deaths, and Texas requires all police shootings to be reported. California has created a public database listing every incident in which a person dies while in police custody. But those states are the exception rather than the rule, and most police departments provide no data at all on police interactions with the public that don’t result in death but may involve serious injury to a suspect.
Those are the kinds of gaps the FBI’s expanded database is intended to cover. The program will still rely on voluntary reporting, however, because the agency doesn’t have the authority to compel local police departments to comply with its requests for data. That could turn out to be a problem if it turns out local departments can’t or won’t cooperate with the agency’s requests for data, and it may require action by Congress to force them to act. But leaders of the nation’s major police organizations have said they are prepared to lobby local departments to produce the data, and the Department of Justice will also make grants available to help them report.
It’s vital that authorities be ready to provide such information to the public in a timely fashion not only to reassure citizens that officers guilty of misconduct will be held accountable but because such transparency is an important part of rebuilding trust between police officers and the communities they serve. Every department should be keeping detailed records on police use of force not only for the federal government but to improve its own interactions with the public. Regardless of what the FBI decides to do with information it collects the protests in cities like Ferguson and Baltimore won’t stop until that happens.